16 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
would trigger a chain reaction. Not only
has the diamond disappeared into the
blackest black but the artistic concept,
the artist, and, finally, the work of art it-
self have disappeared into another sort
of void.” She continued, “I thought about
Duchamp, of course. It’s an inversion of
his maneuver of taking an ordinary ob-
ject”—a snow shovel, a urinal—“and
presenting it as a work of art. Here the
work of art is stripped bare of its ‘art’ by
people trivializing it as a mere science
sensation.” Had Strebe been smoking a
cigarette, this would have been the per-
fect time for her to take a drag.
She was wearing a black leather jacket,
her white-blond hair tucked under a gray
Tyrolean hat, and she spoke in a thick
German accent. Strebe lives in Boston,
but since her exhibit went up, last month,
she’s been hanging around the stock ex-
change, explaining her work to anyone
who comes by: students, artists, curators,
Heraclitus buffs, and the occasional trader.
“The bankers always ask about the price
of the diamond,” she noted.
It might seem odd for an artist to dou-
ble as her own acoustiguide, but Strebe’s
work doesn’t exactly speak for itself. “The
carbon-nanotube material has this prop-
erty that kind of erases three-dimen-
sionality,” she explained. Hence, the blob-
bishness. “Still,” she added, “we didn’t
make a potato disappear.” She spent
more than two years looking for some-
one who would give her a big diamond.
“I wrote to Tiffany, Cartier, De Beers. I
only got a string of no’s.” Eventually, the
jeweller L. J. West agreed to provide a
stone. Strebe slept with it under her pil-
low for several months.
The boardroom doors swung open,
and three men dressed in suits ap-
proached the blob. Strebe moved the
velvet rope aside and explained the work’s
meaning (“It’s a denial of the seductive-
ness of the senses”) and the reasoning
behind the venue (“The stock exchange,
as the holy grail of value determination,
is almost like a sounding board to the
art work”). Then she corrected the rec-
ord: “The art triggered the science.”
“Where’s the diamond from?” one
man asked.
“Australia,” Strebe said. “The persua-
siveness of the glimmering diamond is
something very different from the art
piece, which speaks to an asceticism.”
He nodded. It was almost 4 P.M. The
men had to get downstairs for the clos-
ing bell. They thanked Strebe for her time.
“It’s my pleasure,” she said.
—Tyler Foggatt
1
L.A.POSTCARD
SMASHITL
ast Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg,
the founder and C.E.O. of Face-
book—which has been under attack for
compromising its users’ privacy through
tracking, A.I. facial recognition, and the
sale of personal data—testified before the
House Financial Services Committee
about his awkwardly timed intention to
introduce a cryptocurrency. “Two point
seven billion people use your products.
That’s over a third of the world’s popu-
lation,” Representative Maxine Waters,
the committee’s chair, said to Zucker-
berg. “It should be clear why we have se-
rious concerns about your plans to estab-
lish a global digital currency that would
challenge the U.S. dollar. In fact, you have
opened up a serious discussion about
whether Facebook should be broken up.”
In the first episode of the sixth and
final season of HBO’s Palo Alto satire,
“Silicon Valley,” which aired last Sun-
day, Richard Hendricks, the founder and
C.E.O. of a vexed tech startup called
Pied Piper, delivers his own speech on
Capitol Hill. “Facebook owns eighty per
cent of mobile social traffic,” he says.
“Google owns ninety-two per cent of
search, and Amazon Web Services is
bigger than their next four competitors
combined... .They track our every move,
they monitor every moment in our lives,
and they exploit our data for profit.”
What the world needs, he insists, is “a
new, democratic, decentralized Internet,
one where the behavior of companies
like this will be impossible, forever.” Pied
Piper, which is based around a data-com-
pression algorithm written by Hendricks,
proposes to squash down the stuff on
people’s phones and harness the freed
space to create a peer-to-peer Internet.
Thomas Middleditch, the actor who
plays Hendricks, is thirty-seven and gan-
gly, with downturned Windows-blue eyes
and the moguly nose of an aristocrat. Theother day, he was sitting in a coffee shop
at Silicon Beach, in Los Angeles, a large
corporate park where Google, Facebook,
and YouTube have offices. He wore brand-
less, solid-colored clothing, printed socks,
and a black cap. “We wrapped the last
episode last night at two in the morn-
ing,” he said. “The season is about what
the Internet does to us—and that is to
take our personal information and iden-
tify us and sell it around the world to be
used potentially even against us.” Hen-
dricks, he said, struggles with his moral-
ity, as he tries to resist becoming what he
loathes. “His whole mission was not to
be like the Googles, the Facebooks,” Mid-
dleditch said. “I thought he would even-
tually break bad.”
Middleditch grew up in British Co-
lumbia, the son of educators. Every win-
ter, he bought a season ski pass. “I’d be
‘hunting for that gnar,’ ”—he smiled
toothily—“and the other half of my life
I’d be indoors, in chat rooms, looking at
PC Gamer magazine.” Playing Richard
Hendricks, an angsty, low-E.Q. coder,
required no research. “I spent a lot of
time on LAN—local area network,” he
said. “Very hip. Very cool. I was friends
with, am friends with, Richards and Gil-
foyles and Dineshes for years. We still
play games on the computer.” (On the
show, Gilfoyle is a nihilistic programmer
with an upside-down cross tattoo; Dinesh,
a sardonic, lovelorn software engineer, is
his friend, antagonist, and foil.)
“Back in my day, you’d have Internet
chat forums, and I.R.C.—Internet Relay
Chat,” Middleditch said. “You’d go in
there to lob bombs, get into little type
arguments. Twitter’s that, with the world.
It’s like the Eye of Sauron. In the ‘Lord
of the Rings’ trilogy? The big, bad om-
nivorous presence.” But he does see rays
of hope online. “There’s a sub-sub-sub-
culture called ‘shippers,’ ” he said, short
for “relationshippers.” “Many of them
want Richard and Jared, Pied Piper’s
C.O.O., to fall in love. They’re always
making memes of them in bed together.”
In the years that “Silicon Valley” has
been on, engineers have attempted to
replicate its data-compression algorithm;
others are working on ways to build peer-
to-peer networks from the unused ca-
pacity of phones. Middleditch, too, has
found himself investing in tech start-
ups—in his case, businesses focussed on
staving off climate apocalypse: solar de-